"Habit Busting: A 10-Step Plan That Will Change Your Life"
by Pete Cohen with Sten Cummins
Link: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Habit-Busting-10-Step-Plan-Change/dp/0007146019/
Reading history and reviews
Finished on 15th November 2010
Having borrowed this from the library more times than I care to remember (and not wanting to finally return it today unread) I zipped through "Habit Busting" at an unholy pace in a few hours this afternoon. While this was undoubtedly not the best way to address the material in the book I found it both valuable and interesting to read.
In essence the 10 step plan starts by identifying the habits that you want to change (in my case there are number related to low confidence), and then uses a series of visualisation exercises to create motivation (both positive: imagining yourself in the future free of the habit, and negative: imagining the consequences of not changing), then builds confidence that change is possible, and then helps to make the changes.
Just as the bad habits (whether they are procrastination, over-eating, smoking or whatever) have built up through constant repetition, so breaking them requires constant repetition of the visualisation exercises. It's important to "focus on what you want, not what you don't want", by building new positive habits to replace the negative ones, and many of the exercises concentrate on maximising positive thoughts and feelings at the expense of negative emotions. There is also a nice emphasis on laughter, enjoyment and fun.
I'm not sure how much of this will sink in for me now that I've returned the book but I plan to remind myself of the key points (as well as various notes, I also made recordings of some of the exercises to listen back to over the coming weeks). I think that while success or failure depends largely on the amount of effort that the individual is prepared to put in, "Habit Busting" provides an excellent set of tools for the person who is ready to try.